It was thus that the plague devastated Marseilles and, five years after these calamities, the following inscription was placed upon the frontage of the Town Hall, resembling the pompous epitaphs which we read on a sepulchre:
Massilia Phocensium filia, Romæ soror, Carthaginis terror,
Athenarum æmula.
Paris, Rue d'Enfer, May 1832.
The cholera, starting from the delta of the Ganges in 1817, has spread over a space measuring 2,200 leagues from north to south and 3,500 leagues from east to west; it has wasted 1,400 towns and mowed down 40,000,000 inhabitants. We have a chart tracing the conqueror's march. It has taken fifteen years to come from India to Paris: this means going as fast as Bonaparte; the latter occupied almost the same number of years in passing from Cadiz to Moscow, and he caused the death of only two or three millions of men.
What is the cholera? Is it a mortal wind? Is it insects which we swallow and which devour us? What is this great black death armed with its scythe which, crossing mountains and seas, has come, like one of those terrible pagodas worshipped on the shores of the Ganges, to crush us under its chariot-wheels on the banks of the Seine? If this scourge had fallen in the midst of us in a religious age, if it had spread amid the poetry of manners and of popular beliefs, it would have left a striking picture behind it. Imagine a pall waving by way of a flag from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame; the cannon firing single shots at intervals to warn the imprudent traveller to turn back; a cordon of troops surrounding the city and allowing none to enter or leave; the churches filled with a growing multitude; the priests, by day and night, chanting the prayers of a perpetual agony; the Viaticum carried from house to house with bell and candle; the church-bells incessantly tolling the funeral knell; the monks, crucifix in hand, in the open places, summoning the people to repentance, preaching the wrath and judgment of God, made manifest by the corpses already blackened by Hell's fires.
Then the closed shops; the pontiff, surrounded by his clergy, going, with each rector at the head of his parish, to fetch the shrine of St. Geneviève; the sacred relics carried round the town, preceded by the long procession of the different religious orders, brotherhoods, corporations, congregations of penitents, associations of veiled women, scholars of the University, ministers of the alms-houses, soldiers marching without arms or with pikes reversed; the Miserere chanted by the priests mingling with the hymns of girls and children: all, at certain signals, prostrating themselves in silence and rising to utter fresh complaints.
There was none of all this with us: the cholera came to us in an age of philanthropy, of incredulity, of newspapers, of material administration[384]. This scourge devoid of imagination came upon no old cloisters, nor monks, nor cellars, nor Gothic tombs: like the Terror of 1793, it stalked abroad with a mocking air, in the light of day, in a quite new world, accompanied by its bulletin, which recited the remedies that had been employed against it, the number of victims that it had made, how matters stood, the hopes that were entertained of seeing it come to an end, the precautions that had to be taken to ensure one's self against it, what one should eat, how one ought to dress. And every one continued to attend to his business, and the theatres were filled. I have seen drunkards at the barrier, seated outside the pot-house door, drinking, at a little wooden table, and saying, as they raised their glasses:
"Here's your health, Morbus!"